Los Angeles officials really ought to get their story straight. Either the air quality next to freeways is dangerous or it isn’t.

Either there’s a water crisis that requires drastic cutbacks or there isn’t. Either there’s a shortage of electricity requiring “conservation pricing” or there isn’t.

The news that the Woodland Hills Post Office has lost its lease and will be replaced by a five-story, 335-unit apartment complex, squeezed between tiny Clarendon Street and the 101 Freeway, raises a lot of questions.

For one thing, taxpayers might wonder why the Postal Service was leasing that longtime facility instead of owning it.

The Postal Service says it maintains over 25,300 “leased spaces” nationwide. While it might make sense to rent a corner of a hardware store in a rural area to serve as a convenient local post office, why would the Postal Service pay rent on a 3.62-acre site in Los Angeles for decades?

The landlord of the Woodland Hills Post Office happened to be the longtime president of the Los Angeles City Council, John Ferraro, who served for 35 years beginning in 1966.

Ferraro bought the land at 22121 Clarendon St., in 1963 and later told the L.A. Times he didn’t remember what he paid for it. The sale price was also missing from county property records. Ferraro built a post office on the site, expanded it in 1975, and signed a 20-year lease with the U.S. Postal Service in 1977 that paid him $176,000 in annual rent. He owned the post office until his death in 2001.

In 2013, the site was advertised for sale along with a small office building next door as a “multifamily redevelopment opportunity.”

AMCAL Multi-Housing, Inc., bought the property and declined to renew the post office’s lease at its current rent of about $185,000 per year. Because the developer’s plans for The Clarendon apartments exceed the limits of the site’s zoning and the Ventura/Cahuenga Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan, city approval will be needed.

On a recent evening, the team from AMCAL sat on folding chairs in the community center of a local church, patiently waiting for the Woodland Hills-Warner Center Neighborhood Council to get to one particular item on the agenda: a motion to support The Clarendon apartments.

The meeting was the climax of AMCAL’s 18-month negotiation with the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which finally agreed to support the project if the developer agreed to extra requirements, including signage restrictions and a traffic study to be conducted six months after the project is certified for occupancy.

The Board members take their work very seriously, and they grilled the AMCAL team about traffic, parking and guest parking.

AMCAL said the apartments will generate fewer car trips than the post office, the plan for 564 parking spaces is 78 more than the city requires, and there might be a few guest spaces near the gate.

The motion to support the project passed by one vote.

But the drawn-out process was theater. The Neighborhood Council’s role is purely advisory, with no actual authority over zoning, signage or traffic studies.

AMCAL needs the approval of the City Council, and even that may not be enough to get the project built.

Earlier this year, the City Council reversed its prior approval of a 252-unit townhouse/condo development planned for the Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood. Neighborhood activists had complained it was so close to the 101 Freeway that residents would be living in a “Black Lung zone” that endangered their health.

Jill Stewart, campaign director for the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, which would put a two-year ban on approvals of oversized developments, said in April that seven freeway-adjacent residential projects are in L.A.’s development pipeline, a total of 4,000 units. She called it an example of “how crazy and immoral our city planning system has become.”

The Clarendon apartments would be so close to the freeway that if you lived on the north side of the complex you might not be able to step out of the shower without signaling to the right-hand lane that you’re naked and you’re merging.

City Councilman David Ryu said the Cahuenga Pass project illustrated “the kind of action and the reason why the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is looming over our head. Lack of trust. Lack of transparency.”

Here’s one way to restore trust: Either stop harassing, penalizing and overcharging current residents for water and electricity use, or stop approving plans to replace low-rise commercial buildings with towers of apartments for thousands of new residents.

Meanwhile, the post office is still looking for its new address.

Susan Shelley is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.